Feb

22

Below is the text that accompanied our Honors Colloquium presentation from February 18, 2009. —– The issue of what is and what isn’t postmodern in art history is a difficult one to distinguish, and even though many claim we have left the postmodern era behind in an effort to embrace what is now dubbed contemporary, […]

Feb

2

by Peter Zimmerman I came across this passage by Robert Demachy while reading for the modern/contemporary photography seminar Joan and I are auditing at VCU. It is from 1907, so while the difference in years may seem to bar any real connection to postmodernism, I found it interesting how similar one of his assertions was […]

Jan

24

by Peter Zimmerman “This in turn suggests that art practices predicated on the production of signature styles rather than constantly modified interventions may be especially vulnerable to neutralization of their purported critique. The history of postmodernist photography overall would appear to confirm this analysis. As various theorists have argued, a position of resistance can never […]

Nov

27

by Peter Zimmerman Catherine Ingraham’s essay that accompanies the 1999 Sherrie Levine / Joost van Oss collaborative exhibition at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York City highlights three major facets of their collaborative works of appropriation. However, instead of being merely commentaries on the originals by Gerrit Rietveld, Levine and Oss re-write, and thereby […]

Oct

9

-Peter Zimmerman So much time is spent discussing the role of photography in Sherrie Levine’s early work from the later 1970s/early 1980s; however, her movement into sculpture raises much of the same questions, but pushes the arguments even further. In photographic works like the “After Walk Evans” series or the President/Fashion portraits, Levine simultaneously presents […]

Oct

7

by Joan Bowlen “Be very sure that this man…has an aim loftier than that of a mere flánuer, an aim more general, something other than the figurative pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for that quality that you must allow me to call ‘modernity’…He makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it […]